Defoe’s Deist Masterpiece?

Abstract

Is there a short and easy way to explain the career of Daniel Defoe? Literary historians have generally thought not, sometimes to their own frustration. The extent and diversity of Defoe’s output have confounded efforts to locate a simple principle of coherence within it, uncertainties of attribution make it difficult to establish what the full extent of Defoe’s output actually was, and the elusiveness of Defoe himself – as author, as narrator, and as historical personage – has tended to deepen rather than to dispel the confusion. Like his most famous creation, Defoe seems to have led an ‘unaccountable Life’, and the question of how he came to write one of the foundational works of English prose fiction is therefore one that appears to admit of no simple answer. If the terms ‘genius’ and ‘accident’ are, as Ian Watt suggested, ‘the twin faces on the Janus of the dead ends of literary history’, what lexicon could guide us through the labyrinth of Defoe’s careers as hosier, anti-Stuart rebel, merchant, shipbroker, cat farmer, brick and pantile manufacturer, accountant, property speculator, pamphleteer, and political spy, to his creation of Robinson Crusoe?